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Sunday, March 3, 2002
Information Overflow [Review]
MEDIA UNLIMITED: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, By Todd Gitlin, Metropolitan Books
" ... attempt to make overall sense of what he calls the 'media torrent': television, radio, film, video, music, print media, the Internet--the whole shebang. ... Gitlin's goal is 'to grasp the totality of the media' ... It originates in a web of supply and demand, involving modern capitalism, available technology and human desires, especially the modern desire for what Gitlin calls "disposable feelings," and the quick and transient (and thus self-perpetuating) pleasures of drama, emotion and connection."
" ... Gitlin identifies various coping styles. The "fan" selectively over- identifies with media icons; the "content critic," on the other hand, '[b]eholding the media flux ... tries to keep a certain distance from the foam to avoid a soaking' but assumes that 'if the content were only improved, so would the world be.' Other responses include the 'paranoid,' the 'exhibitionist' (an eager participant), the 'ironist' (knowing but not overly subversive), the 'jammer,' the 'secessionist' and the 'abolitionist.' ... the torrent's synergy, he suggests, transcends profit. Capitalism and modern technology don't simply mold us, they confront and accommodate us."
" ... 'the media's political impacts. The bigger story is demobilization. The ceaseless quest for disposable feeling and pleasure hollows out public life altogether.' ... Gitlin's sanguine assessment of the role of American popular culture in the world at large. ... Hollywood's fixation with pleasing and teasing, and so maximizing, its audiences: a devotion to distraction, stimulation and 'packaged innocence.'" ... [more]
11:08:34 AM 
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